Solve missing bare code from suppliers

Before to start implementing a WMS solution it is netter to made an audit of your organization to see how prepared is to make the next step. One of the key problem of a WMS solution it is the barcode. When you made the audit, you must see if all your products have a barcode on it and if the small selling unit has a barcode on it.

Some supplier put barcode on the products but only on the box for example, and this will not help you of you sell on pieces not on box. You must analyze all your products portfolio to see how much of them respect these criteria.

It is very difficult to do this if you had many products into the portfolio because it is a huge task. My recommendation is to do this in the inventory time and, depends on the way that you made inventory to put people to note in the products has barcode code or not on the smallest selling unit.

The next step in to identify those products who not has bar code on it and to find solution to put bar code on it. I recommend you few solutions to solve this problem:

Discuss with the producers to put bar code on the products. This is very important and very easy for you because do not involve any resources from your side. But, always exist a but, depends on the process that they have implemented not all the producers will can do this task. Some of them will agree to put it, because the process is simple and permit to do that, some of them will tell you that they will prepare into the future and some of them will tell you that they will do it but you must pay supplementary and some of them will tell you that they cannot not able to do that. For those who ask you more money to put bar code on the products you must made a small calculation and it is ok you will accept if not you must find another solution;

For some products will you not solve the problems after first step and you must find another solution. If the products are few (few it is very general and you must understand this in context of your logistic operation). Best way is to apply a sticker with barcode when you receive those products, but this is not very easy because it increases the reception time and if you do not have time or space in warehouse you cannot do it. If you can do it you must increase the resources allocate for reception. It exists also another solution, but you must have in mind that any solution that you will adopt is only for some period of time because at the end you must have bar code for each selling unit.

The alternative solution is to not put barcode on the reception but having bar code to receive the product based on that. We solve this problem to put client print a document with the products that we must receive and put a column with barcode on the document. When picker made reception, he will scan the barcode form the document for each product. This will solve the problems because partial, because the products must move into the warehouse based on the bar code if you implement the WMS. To do this and solve problem it is necessary that WMS solution to have the possibility for this product to assign products with cell and have the products barcode near the cell barcode. In this case assign products with cell it is a feature that WMS solution just have (for this reason our WMS solution WebWMS – free WMS solution has this feature implement in standard version.)

You must have in mind that some of the products you deliver to the supermarket and for those products, if you listed this products to supermarket and supermarket wants their code on the products (I will explain in other post why supermarket wants this ), you must apply supermarket bar code on the products on delivery, so if you already consume resources we advise clients to move this process to the reception and modify the procedure and process (if clients has procedure).

Put barcode on the products it is a very important asks and as you see it is not very simple to fulfill this task and also it requires some period of time to be done. You will succeed to do that in different time frame and this is important aspect if you decide to implement a WMS solution and use WMS solution at full capacity.

We can help you in all this process and we have a lot of experience in this, so please contact me if you have in mind to made the next step.